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Familiar Letters and Familiar Faces

Familiar Letters and Familiar Faces

Chapter:

(p.129)
Chapter Eight Familiar Letters and Familiar Faces

Source:

Sojourners in a Strange Land

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226355610.003.0008

The mixed legacy of the intense image-making that characterized the first century of the Society of Jesus's presence in the Middle Kingdom underwrites the reappearance of the various personae of the Jesuit missionary man of science in a forum outside their generic homes: the familiar letter. First articulated in Louis Lecomte's Nouveaux memoires sur la Chine, then serialized in the pages of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, and ultimately synthesized in Jean-Baptiste du Halde's Description...de la Chine (1735), the Enlightenment's touchstone for matters Chinese, this epistolary form provided a stage on which the scientific missionary could reenact all of his various personae, free of the burdens and limitations imposed by their native genres. This chapter explores these manifestations and sets the sundry personations of the missionary man of science against the backdrop of the closing decades of the Jesuits' adventure in late imperial China.

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PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use (for details see www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 December 2018